Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Hi all! Looking forward to a great day. A couple of notes: do please pick up your THATCamp / Culture Hack badge on the Embassy level. Culture Hack will be in International North (one flight up), and THATCamp sessions will be on the Embassy level in the Manila and Singapore rooms. See the schedule for specific sessions.

I would love to hear about how THATCampMCN campers facilitate online conversations among students, museum patrons, and others about specific images and texts. I am particularly interested in learning about and trying out the features of Omeka, Commentpress and other WordPress plugins, and sites like Digress.it that allow users to publicly comment on specific aspects of texts or images. Perhaps we could schedule a time to have a conversation/group exploration of some of the best ways to curate online conversations. Maybe Jason could show us how Zotero allows for group explorations of sources and such. I am open to ideas…and help!

As someone who teaches writing and rhetoric, I am interested in talking about how we can create partnerships between museums and literature and composition classrooms in higher-ed. I’ve had some wonderful success teaching the museum or museum exhibits as texts in first-year composition. As rhetorical constructs with a purpose, intended audience, historical and social context, etc., that often integrate multiple modes (written, oral, visual, electronic) and media (video, interactive digital displays, podcasts, sculpture) museum exhibits offer particularly exciting opportunities for defamiliarizing and examining rhetorical concepts and the communication affordances of different modes and media. As public spaces in which learning takes place outside of the classroom, museums potentially offer extraordinary service-learning opportunities that might engage students in the production and curation of culture and knowledge.

Now, I’m not talking about getting undergraduates involved in mounting an exhibit at the High. Instead, I’m thinking about how curators from the High might work with a class, or two, or three at someplace like Georgia Tech to mount an exhibit in a public space on campus that relates the subject matter of the course and provides students with an opportunity to hone communication strategies while engaging in public discourse. At Georgia Tech, one of my colleagues, Doris Bremm is currently working with the Ferst Center gallery on an exhibition of student work. Are there other similar projects out there? Are there any potential sources of funding to help encourage and finance this sort of collaboration? Is this even something museum professionals might find interesting? Finally, how is this sort of work related to the work or work-ethic of the Digital Humanities? If anyone else would like to talk about and maybe even answer some of these questions, we could organize a session around them.

THATCamp is looking to create a short piece that documents the history of THATCamp, interviews from participants, short footage from various THATCamps from around the world, and the issues surrounding developing and creating unconferences. In the spirit of THATCamp, we’d like to crowdsource part of the film, and get a good sense of different locations where THATCamps occur, different opinions about THATCamp as a phenomenon, different methods used to organize different Camps, etc.

I notice that there are MCN sessions on things that overlap our interests here (sometimes also on Saturday). So, what do people think of THATCamp sessions that look back at what we’ve learned in the THATCamp spirit of discussion and putting together something actionable? For example, if you got an introduction to Linked Open Data and need to talk through what the heck it’s all about and what to do with it, a THATCamp non-sage-on-the-stage session to do that might help. (And yes, if you go to the LOD talks and that’s your first intro to it, you WILL need to talk through it!)

I’d be happy to convene sessions about Drupal and/or Linked Data, but I want to float the idea as it might apply to anything you might want to yack and hack on more from MCN.

In this general brainstorming discussion, I invite everyone — curators, researchers, technologists, museum goers — to discuss this question in an open and casual environment. If you have other questions in mind such as:

What is augmented reality?

How is augmented reality being used today by other people?

Have other museums introduced AR to their collections?

… we will take 10 minutes to cover “the basics.” And once we’re all jogging at the same pace, we’ll get our pencils and papers out and get to the meat of the session: how can AR be used to enhance a museum’s collection? (using many, many videos as references for what’s possible in AR)

We have been collaborating for three years on two NEH-funded projects and we are currently team-teaching a transdisciplinary course focused on gaming in the humanities. The course bridges two Colleges, bringing together undergraduate and graduate students in computer science, undergraduate students in film and media studies, and graduate students in English and creative writing. The course will culminate in five prototypes of “games,” some of which we expect to continue to develop in Fall 2012. Although we feel we are succeeding in our collaboration, we have discovered the need for an adaptive approach in order to get humanists to understand the technical aspects of software design and techies to appreciate the nature of scholarship in the humanities. We suspect others might also have stories of success (and some lessons learned from failure) that would be of value for discussion. Thus, we propose a session on bridging the divide between the humanities and computer science.

Hi, everyone — I’m Amanda’s and Mary’s TCMCN co-organizer. As a librarian rather than a museum professional, I’m not sure to what extent I can put on a session that’s useful or interesting to this crowd. I published a book about Zotero this year, and I’m wondering whether there’d be any interest in a discussion session about Zotero — I’m prepared to discuss its implications as an open source research tool, what I see as best practices for using it as a teaching tool, and so on.

Amanda French here, overall THATCamp Coordinator and (which is rare) chief organizer of The Humanities and Technology Camp, Museum Computer Network edition. We’re now just ten days away from THATCamp MCN and Culture Hack Dat on 11/19, and I wanted to give you more info about what we’ve got planned.

Badges and scheduling

We’ll be issuing badges starting at 8:30am, and those badges will enable you to attend THATCamp MCN and Culture Hack sessions as well as entitling you to attend the MCN meeting plenary at 4pm (but not any other MCN sessions). Note that the time slots on our schedule don’t overlap exactly with MCN sessions; if you are registered for MCN as well, please plan accordingly.

Your profile and login

If you’re receiving this e-mail, you’re definitely accepted and registered for THATCamp MCN and/or Culture Hack Day: some login information and acceptance notifications have apparently been sent to spam folders. Visit mcn2011.thatcamp.org/wp-login.php and click the “Lost password” link on the login page if you don’t know your password. Then log in and update your profile so that everyone can see what you’re about by browsing our Participants page.

Workshops

We’ve currently got four workshops planned: Intro to Omeka, Advanced Omeka, HistoryPin, and Augmented Reality. See mcn2011.thatcamp.org/workshops for full descriptions and workshop preparations and prerequisites.

Now is the time to start thinking about what you’d like to do or talk about at THATCamp MCN, and I’ll be sending more reminders in the days to come. If you’re not familiar with the unconference model, you might want to read our page about THATCamp, but also and especially our page on Proposing a Session. The best way to approach it might be to describe whatever professional problem is currently bothering you most, and to pose your session proposal in such a way that you’ll get help with that problem. You can even propose to teach another workshop, if you like — Miguel Palma has indicated that he’d be willing to teach us about Metaio, for instance.

To propose a session, log in at mcn2011.thatcamp.org/wp-login.php and write a blog post outlining your session idea. To write and publish your blog post, go to Posts –> Add New, write your post, and then click Publish. Your blog post will be published to the main page of the THATCamp MCN site, which will allow us all to read and comment on it.

Starting in the 9am session on Saturday, we’ll all discuss together which sessions we want to hold that day and when, and you’ll have a chance then to propose new sessions or to ask for a particular time slot (perhaps one that doesn’t conflict with an MCN session) on the schedule.

Culture Hack

If you’d rather be hacking than yakking in the unconference sessions (or taking workshops), then you can take part in the Culture Hack, where you’ll get the chance to develop with cultural heritage data, do paper prototyping, and more.

After the THATCamp on Saturday there will be a happy hour at Max Lager’s from 6-8pm. Everyone is welcome to attend and socialize over microbrews, wines and food. The venue is only one block north of the Hyatt Regency at 320 Peachtree Street.